Distraction

I've always had the feeling that part of the genius of American politics is that if you play it right, you can get it to leave you alone almost completely. If you stop taking the endless back and forth seriously, it seems possible to live a satisfactory life "in the cracks," as it were between the poles.

Legislation goes back and forth, regulation goes back and forth, politically correct trends go back and forth. It is impossible to plan your life around what the government is going to do next and what popular whim they will follow.

But the advantage to the endless tit-for-tatting is that it keeps people's political interest distracted - endlessly - on issues that transcend relevance to the average human lifespan. So if some movement or litigation takes 50 years to move through, this can be scored as a great victory for humanity and for future generations. But if you were 20 when it started, that leaves you with precious little life left to enjoy the fruits of the struggle (or suffer its consequences depending on what side of the issue you were on).

But when we largely ignore the collective zeitgeist tennis match, we can carve out a niche for ourselves that can be left largely undisturbed by the throngs throwing their electoral weight this way and that. This always struck me as one of America's best kept secrets for insuring individual liberty - endless, narcissistic distraction of government with itself.


The preceding thoughts were those of a mind not yet hooked in to American politics, but I think it still reflects a point worth considering. In the Enlightenment way of thinking, the thrust of action is more towards humanity than towards the individual human. So it can take ages for science to 'figure' out a cure for a disease or a new technology that will change everything, and this is fine and well. But people are living now, in the present (as they say in California), and this model tends to ignore that fact. Yes, part of us will always want to contribute to the "great work" of perfecting humanity and leaving a better world for our great-grandchildren. But we also must give due respect to this unique life lived in this unique, time-limited body. In our missionary zeal to change the world, we mustn't lose sight entirely of the simple, biological fact of mortality. Otherwise our struggle becomes nothing but an escape from our own leaves we are meant to live.